Hosting Tutorial & Guide

NameCheap VS 1and1 – Who Performs Better in Linux Web Hosting

As NameCheap and 1and1 are both big and top-notch Linux web hosting companies, we would like to give the following fair and directive comparison for the two companies so as to help people who are in a dilemma in choosing the better one. Moreover, this comparative review comes from our long-time related hosting experience on recommending the best Linux web hosting providers on the market.

Furthermore, having collected and made an analysis of a wide range of customers' reviews and voices, we make out the following customers' ratings from many crucial elements in Linux hosting, such as hosting features, customer support, uptime, reliability, price and page loading speed. More well-selected and elaborately-made information is listed as follows.

About NameCheap and 1and1

Both NameCheap and 1and1 are providers of multiple online services including domain name registration and web hosting. Another similarity between them is that they both enjoy better reputation in domain registration than in the web hosting field.

They have been putting much emphasis on the domain services, and as for the web hosting solutions, they still need improvements in the performance, support, and several other aspects, which makes them not staying among the top web hosts. Details are offered in the comparison below.

Plans & Cost

As a secure and reputed hosting provider, NameCheap offers webmasters its popular shared hosting packages of Value, Professional, Ultimate and Business SSD plan with differently-distributed hosting features included. Moreover, this company provides a considerable discount for the annual and billing cycle, which means that the longer the subscription time lasts and the cheaper the hosting price is. In addition, to make things simple and visualized, we have listed out the specific hosting price of this company's packages as follows.

Plan in Comparison

Value

Professional

Ultimate

Business SSD

1-month

-

$7.48/mo

$13.98

$19.98/mo

3-month

-

$6.95/mo

$11.95/mo

-

6-month

-

$6.78/mo

$11.28/mo

$18.98/mo

1-year

$3.98/mo

$6.48/mo

$10.98/mo

$17.98/mo

2-year

$3.48/mo

$5.98/mo

$9.98/mo

-

3-year

$2.95/mo

$5.59/mo

$9.06/mo

-

Compared with its competitor, 1and1 has three alternative shared hosting plans which are named as Basic, Unlimited and Performance plan with different hosting features integrated in the meantime. To be more specific, they differently charge for $5.99/mo, $8.99/mo and $14.99/mo previously. To everyone's delight, this web host gives a more cost-effective sale price of $0.99/mo, $5.99/mo and $10.99/mo for visitors who are currently buying its hosting products.

Besides, it is quite apparent that the hosting price of 1and1 is much cheaper and affordable than that of NameCheap. But when 1and1 is compared with other cheap and high-quality web hosting companies, such as WebHostingHub whose price starts from $1.95/mo only, it is also not an affordable and cost-effective choice.

Control Panel & Features

Perhaps one of the biggest disparities existing between NameCheap and 1and1 is that the former supports the highly-recommended and popular cPanel admin panel while the latter makes use of its self-developed control panel, which is of course not as user-friendly and customer-oriented as cPanel.

Furthermore, there are other marked differences in regards to the built-in hosting features and we list some outstanding ones as follows. TO ensure a better understanding of thier features, we will also mention the PersonalClass plan, a rich-featured web hosting plan offered by WebHostingHub.

Performance & Customer Support

Moreover, to make the network environment stable and secure enough for people to one hundred percent focus their attention on running the site, both of the two shared hosting providers make use of numerous award-winning technologies and facilities. For example, both of the companies adopt the optimal content delivery network service of CloudFlare and redundant and strong power supply from UPS.

What's more, both of them vow to provide customers with competitive page loading and network response speed by utilizing high-performance servers and state-of-the-art data centers all over the world. Besides, according to our hands-on statistics on keeping constant monitoring on the two companies' networks and servers, the actual uptime of NameCheap and 1and1 averages 99.91% and 99.92%. At the same time, the average network response time of them are 820ms and 757ms, both which are slower than many other average hosting companies.Speaking to the customer support, both of them have their customers prepared with piles of directive and in-depth hosting related solutions and answers in the community forum and knowledgebase, such as domain name registration, account payment gateway update and import of MySQL databases by using PHP. However, as is mentioned above, only NameCheap gives support for 24x7-based live chat contact way and only 1and1 supports the most convenient phone call contact way.

Pros and Cons of Hosting with NameCheap

In this section, we will brief the advantages and disadvantages of NameCheap web hosting services so that readers can judge for themselves whether to go with this hosting provider.

Pros

The prices for the initial term are very low. New customers can get a web hosting plan with 20 GB SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth and 50 email accounts by paying $9.88 only for the first year.

NameCheap offers cPanel in all web hosting plans, which helps much with the website and account management.

The company can guarantee a good uptime which is over 99.9% on average.

NameCheap provides 24x7 technical support through live chat and the ticket system.

Cons

The renewal prices of the web hosting plans are usually over 3 times higher than the costs of the initial term.

NameCheap servers are slow. Server responses always take over 800ms.

The company does not provide support through phone.

The money-back guarantee is limited to 14 days which are even much shorter than the industry standard – 30 days.

Pros and Cons of Hosting with 1and1

1and1 has been doing well in some aspects like the security and reliability. However, its web hosting services have many more disadvantages which can be seen in below.

Pros

Customers can host unlimited domains with a low cost of $0.99/mo for the first year with 1and1. However, the renewal takes $6.99/mo.

The company has been offering good uptime.

A free domain is included in each web hosting plan.

Cons

1and1 provides a custom control panel which cannot compete with the popular cPanel and may cause troubles and inconveniences for beginners.

The technical support offered by this company is not available through live chat.

There are a large number of complaints about 1and1 web hosting on the web.

Conclusion

In summary, both of NameCheap and 1and1 have their own advantages over each other. For example, the former endows richer features and higher uptime with live chat support way, and the other way around, the latter has more affordable and better performance.

But for webmasters that have been seeking for a multi-functional web host which is rich in features, cheap in price with supporting all effective contact ways of phone call and email system as well as live chat, we have the recommendations as follows.

We've been an independent web hosting review site, and have reviewed 200+ web hosts since 2006 - trying to help web masters find the best hosting deals based on the budget and requirement, including shared web hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated servers.